Every THE D[AI]LY BRIEF article on tokenizer inflation — enterprise AI analysis, benchmarks, vendor comparisons, and ROI frameworks for technology and business leaders. Updated as new coverage publishes.
Priced on one normalised agent workload, a month of inference costs $370 on GPT-5.6 Luna and $10,725 on Claude Opus 5. Output, reasoning and cache-read rates explain the gap, not the input price.
September 11, 2026 · 22 min read
Anthropic is in advanced talks to buy Decart for roughly $7 billion, mostly in its own pre-IPO stock, to cut what a Claude token costs it to produce. Every Sonnet through 4.6 still lists at its March 2024 price, and the one cut that did land arrived as a new model number — which is why a flat multi-year rate card is the wrong thing to sign this quarter.
August 18, 2026 · 13 min read
Claude Sonnet 5 and GPT-5.6 Terra both list at $2 per million input tokens. On the same workload Sonnet 5 bills 15% more, because Claude 4.7 and later tokenize the same text into roughly 30% more tokens. Prices, latency and governance terms compared as of 5 August 2026.
August 4, 2026 · 17 min read